Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.

Uma Gowrishankar

Uma Gowrishankar lives in Chennai, South India. She writes, paints, practices yoga and maintains a terrace garden in the middle of a noisy and populated city. She blogs at umagowrishankar.wordpress.com.

The moon is pale as buttermilk, watered
down to feed me in school. Oil-stained walls
crumble as I stuff infinity in my mouth. One
stone a year fills my body, engorges pathways
I essay every day through fetid night soil.

There is sand on the bed, hands tremble
as I carve a wedge of dirt from the fingernail —
particles that compose soul leak from a hole
that remains unvisited like the brick house
at the peripheral colony in my home town.

Birds fill my mouth, stir air in the lungs,
levitate vapour of existence that I see hover
above heads of palm trees framed
by the window – a scrap of paper, letters
scrawled like ants they stamp under their feet.

In the dark space between words I hold a torch
for my mother to examine blue toenails,
black calluses, whorls that once mesmerised –
pathways she consulted to map a horoscope
now a poem unwriting itself on the paper.

The book is on the floor face down, arms
splayed, pages like clumps of hair tugged.
My spine broke, among other body parts
as I flung from the chair — I have known
nothing of anatomy, only of distant stars.

The title of the poem is borrowed from Rohith Vemula’s suicide note. The poem is a response to his tragic death.

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The water mark below my lips at the place
cleft disappears like a rumour.

I watched the water level rise above my heart
where a spring lies buried.

Then to my neck as the serpent stirred, scales
beehive of deep and long sighs.

I smelled earth, roots of the neem tree in clumps
of clay that snagged my voice.

Like a beaker the vocal chord filled, brimmed over
when a turtle choked the larynx.

As the noise subsided I heard the announcement
from the sky. The wind fell.

In the darkness among abandoned homes plumeria
rendered odourless.

Pale with terror pigeons under windowsills breathed
lung full with bones of the drowned.

In response to “Flooded” by Jean Morris. Chennai experienced unprecedented rain and flooding in December 2015, claiming many lives and rendering people homeless. The apartment block where I live was flooded. I had to move out and stay away from home for 17 days. I wrote poems during this period to cope with the suffering I saw around, to grapple with the distress of displacement, of being homeless.